It is at forty that the young men of this period will be at their best; they will have lost their suspiciousness and pretensions, and have gained ease and gaiety.
[1] M. de Francueil with too much powder: Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay.
CI
Discussion between an Honest Man and an Academic
"In this discussion, the academic always saved himself by fixing on little dates and other similar errors of small importance; but the consequences and natural qualifications of things, these he always denied, or seemed not to understand: for example, that Nero was a cruel Emperor or Charles II a perjurer. Now, how are you to prove things of this kind, or, even if you do, manage not to put a stop to the general discussion or lose the thread of it?
"This, I have always remarked, is the method of discussion between such folk, one of whom seeks only the truth and advancement thereto, the other the favour of his master or his party and the glory of talking well. And I always consider it great folly and waste of time for an honest man to stop and talk with the said academics." (Œuvres badines of Guy Allard de Voiron.)
CII
Only a small part of the art of being happy is an exact science, a sort of ladder up which one can be sure of climbing a rung per century—and that is the part which depends on government. (Still, this is only theory. I find the Venetians of 1770 happier than the people of Philadelphia to-day.)
For the rest, the art of being happy is like poetry; in spite of the perfecting of all things, Homer, two thousand seven hundred years ago, had more talent than Lord Byron.
Reading Plutarch with attention, I think I can see that men were happier in Sicily in the time of Dion than we manage to be to-day, although they had no printing and no iced punch!